Well, I don't necessarily agree that people should be FORCED to protect themselves. I was using the seatbelt example more as in "we didn't know how important they are" and hence didn't wear them.
Emotions appear to be automatic neural responses to various sensory inputs. So I pretty much agree with your thoughts on how emotions work.
I never said you need to prove something 100%, but one should still attempt to obtain more information about a situation, time permitting of course. You example of law and order is actually illustrative of this. The detectives try to find as much information as possible to convince a jury to convict. It also highlights the dangers of relying on emotion. Many times the jury will 'buy' some act of the accused. These acts are designed to play on the jurys emotions and specifically 'confuse' the facts.
I also agree that there is a time facter in desicions. But, also drawing on the example of the military, trusting one's emotion is rarely the correct thing to do. Military training is designed to *overcome* emotion for the most part. If you are under fire, emotion will say to either run or hide. Of course, niether of those options is what solders are trained for. They are trained to fight. There *are* some rare examples of military training that rely on emotions, the Isrealie army comes to mind as one.
I say emotions are primitive because they evolved to be usefull in situtations which no longer occur. Many emotions, fight or flight, anger, love, were usefull to early nomadic tribes. Fighting over food, running from animals, keeping the men around to protect their young.
Today's world is different. We have the luxury to take the time to think about most of our situations. We understand how to train ourselves to overcome our emotions so we can excell at particular tasks. Unfortunately, we let our emotions rule us still. Take this example. There are lots of arguments whether or not we are cause the global destruction of our environment. Looking at it logically, if there is a reasonable chance we are, it is smart to try to prevent it while we research the matter furthur. If we ignore it, we are taking a pretty big gamble with the only thing which sustains our life, earth.
Of course, greed overcomes any logic in this case. People are willing to take this absurd gamble because of their overwealming greed. Sure, in nomadic times, greed served us well. But now, it's often far better to rely on logic.
But the way he described it, the signal would have been in base 1, not base 10. In base one, you would write 11 as
11111111111
and 13 as
1111111111111
In the hoax post, the signal supposedly was made up of strings of a certain number of one's delimited by a single zero. Thus, the signal would be in base 1. Terribly inefficient, but simple I suppose.
Sooo, do you think you have enough information to make a logical decision to use your emotions? If you don't have enough infomration to make semi-logical choices for the majority of common situtaion, then perhaps you haven't thought about those situations enough.
Emotions were usefull in primitive society. Now, they often get you in trouble more than anything. Take anger. People following this emotion has led to road rage, killings, beatings, many firings, bad customer service, etc etc etc. Take love, people do SO many stupid things because of love. You think people would learn from these stupid things, but no. They do not. Or take greed.
If there is a lack of information avaliable, the logical thing to do is to try to FIND information. Not fall back on primitive emotions.
Perhaps what you are referring to are situations involving ethics. Where logic is perhaps too *harsh* to be applied. In these situations it is indeed wiser to follow one's emotions. But not because of a lack of information. Rather, because we are still quite primitive as a species. Regardless of what we think of ourselves, many of our actions are not at all logical, nor are the smart, or wise, or anything of the like. As a result, being logical in ALL situations will quickly get you branded a lunatic, heritic, insenstive, immoral, or any number of other derogatory terms.
Humans still incredibly stupid. We all simply have a HUGE ego problem.
Wow. Your country is insane. As a non-american, I don't want to see Bush re-elected. But that protest cage is disgusting as well.
I fear for the safty of the world from the menace that has become the USA.:( The freedom your country defined has been eroded away to a mere shadow of what it once was.
I didn't realize that you were "most people". You think just because YOU haven't been affected by Microsoft vulnerabilities, that most other Windows users haven't been as well? That's an invalid generalization if there ever was one.
Notice I never said that most windows users have not been affected by a vulnerability? Notice that I said *I* have never been affected? Not being affected has a lot to do with knowing how to secure computer systems and avoid installing suspect software. I do not disagree that there are bad microsoft vulnerabilities that affect a ton of users. But, slashdot is still overly zealous in their reports on microsoft vulnerabilities.
Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Microsoft software is technologically inferior.
Nope. Microsoft is not inferior at all. It is far more insecure, yes, but it's definatly not inferior. Part of why microsoft software is insecure is that it is far more complicated than other pieces of software. For instance, the recent run URI handler 'vulnerability' that slashdot jumped on. Mac OS X also has such functionality, and had similar vulnerabilites. Linux did not have similar vulnerabilites, because it does not have this functionality.
No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
Keep in mind that no other operating system EVER MADE has had the reach or user base that Windows has either. No doubt people will learn from Microsoft's mistakes, just as Microsoft has. This is the way of the world.
Airplanes used to have very little security, and people would even smoke on them. Cars originally had no seat belts, and even when they did, wearing them was not mandatory for the longest time. Moterbike riders didn't used to wear, or have to wear, helments. These are all absurd things *now*, but at the time people did not realize it.
Operatining systems are no different. Before the internet, microsoft did not need to think of securing in the way they do now. They realized the importance of it too late, and are now in quite a bind.
I always find it funny that people on slashdot tend to have a holier than thou attitude instead of a "let's observe and learn" attitude. This is why slashdot's silly anti-microsoft slant annoys me so. Other sites report on windows problems without being so snide.
Funny, I haven't been affected by even one microsoft vulnerability. I think slashdot overinflates the microsoft vulnerabilities.
The biggest microsoft vulnerability is the users. You could simply put up a page with instructions on how to install a backdoor prgram and many clueless users would go right ahead and do it so long as you promised great riches.
The only reason slashdot makes a big deal about microsoft vulnerabilities is because slashdot is pro linux and anit-microsoft. You want proof that slashdot is anti-microsoft?
Well, the slashdot microsoft icon is the windows icons, but with all the windows broken. No what fantasy world you live in, you cannot argue that that is not blatently anti-microsoft .
I *was* a customer of the RIAA. In fact, I used to buy quite a lot of CDs. But the RIAA lost me as a customer, due to their tactics and greed. Suing people was only the last straw for me. Why do you think people copy music? Let me outline to you why *I* became vehemently anti-RIAA.
So the internet MP3 music craze hit, I discovered internet radio. At the time, there were TONS of internet radio stations. By listening to these stations, I found huge amounts of new music. I had never heard anything like it before, it was a revelation. I found totaly new genres of music that I liked.
I'd also copy down the song names, and I was buying lots of music as a result. Now, I always preview the music before buying it. One song does not make me go out and buy an album. I have to like most of it to get it. CDNOW and HMV were often not bad for previews. But here is where the problem starts. See, the RIAA like to push only one type of music. Mass market pop drivel. And particularly they like to push RIAA licensed music. The primary genra of music I listen to is downtemp. This is decided *not* a market the RIAA likes to push. The RIAA has a significant influence over CDNOW and HMV, this becomes quite clear later on in this story.
CDNOW and HMV did not have previews for ALL music. Obvously, they want to provide previews for popular music first. Needless to say, much of the stuff I was interested in didn't have previews. So I'd download the album from p2p to preview it. If I liked it, I got the CD. See, I can tell the difference between CD and MP3 quality. Also some of my players don't like burned discs all that much. So I like buying CDs. I was happy with this arrangment of previewing using internet radio and downloading. I was buying record amounts music too.
Then the RIAA started bitching about downloading and calling people thieves. Seeing as how I occasionally downloaded things, this did not make me particularly happy. But it got worse. The RIAA attacted the online radio people first. I was getting more and more pissed off by their tactics at this point. Finally, they managed to pretty much kill most internet radio in the USA. Many of you will remember the likes of SomaFM going down, as well as many other stations. As I saw it, the RIAA tried to kill the one means of finding new music that I had.
Now I could still use european stations, and the one or two US based ones that manged to pay the RIAA tax. So it wasn't the end of the world yet. But BOY was I pissed. I was already buying less in protest of the RIAA. Then they really started targeting downloaders. By that point the online sites had far more previews, and I wasn't downloading nearly as much. But occasionally, I still needed to preview something for which no preview was avaliable. The RIAA started suing p2p users. They were trying to further limit my ability to sample music. Around the same time, more shit hit the fan.
Import albums always cost more than the US based pop drivel albums cost. It was always a sore point. Suddenly, HMV and other stores, start doing two things. If it's an import, it's *double* a regular cd. If it's a non-RIAA artist, YOU CAN'T EVEN BUY IT!! I don't buy any music now. Haven't for the last year or two. And it's the RIAA tactics that did it.
This is the chilling effect. It's very real and their sales figures are evidence of it.
This is what I also said, when the argument I just gave was put to me. I wanted to see what others thought of it though. I really need to study this stuff more.
Its a very silly idea because it breaks the principle of equivalence - you can now tell if you are in an elevator or a gravitational field by bringing a mass close to a test mass to almost cancel out the field and observing whether or not you see the weak gravity effect.
With sufficiantly accurate measurment devices (which we don't happen to have), you should be able to tell the difference between an elevator or a gravitational field anyways. Why? Gravity is a field. Therefore the force at your head is ever so slightly less than the force at your feet, theoretically. With an elevator, the force is the same throughout your body.
Of course I am stereotyping but Apple's success is based in their loyal, vocal, energetic community.
Yes. You are stereotyping. I'd say this was true 'historically'. But it's changing. For instance, the ipod is different in the sense that it's a *general* hit. Far more people buy and want ipods than those in the 'Apple community'. There are many many people who use ipods, but don't use Apple computers.
I'd say your stereotype is also fairly wrong for Apple computer users. I have a powerbook, I love it. But I'm not what you'd consider part of the 'Apple community'. Why did I buy a powerbook? Sure, the integration is asolutely amazing, and they are stunning machines, but I got it because of OS X. If it ran OS 9, I would not have bought it. There are a lot of unix users who are migrating to OS X and Apple. These people are not fanatical Apple fans. I am thoroughly impressed with OS X and with Apple machines. I'll even rave about them to others. But that is only because the technology is genuinly cool. I'll equally rave about other cool technology.
Real is targeting ipod owners, not apple community members. Hence, Real probably doesn't care much about this backlash.
Proprietary is anticompetitive by definition.
Really? Care to show me this definition? I always thought it was quite the opposite. Proprietary means that you think your technology is *better* than other peoples, and therefore valuble. You also think people will be willing to pay for it, instead of paying someone else for their technology. This is called competition.
Sharing like one big happy family is not competition. It's called working together. Open source is working together, it's not *competition*.
Now, *standards* are a different story. Having open standards is said to promote competition, yes. This is really relevant when one company has a monoply. In this case consumers will always go with the most prevalent protocal since they will not risk being in the position where their purchase will not work with item X. In such a case having an open standard will usually promote competition. Perhaps the ipod already constitutes a monoply, perhaps not.
I totally agree with you. DRM music is totally useless. I rarely play music on my PC and when I do I usually stream sites anyways. To have my music locked to say my windows computer only... is absolutely useless for me. What about my mac laptop? What about my car stereo? What about potential mp3 type players I might use in the future? What about my Linux computer at work? What if I want to take some music on a CD into a friends car?
A non-copy protected CD allows me to do all this, plus the music is non-lossy. Believe me, often times it's easy to tell the quality difference with certain music and stereo systems. Hell, I can even distinguish well recorded 'CD's from poorly recorded ones.
Ah. Typical biased response from a Linux faithfull.
One piece of hardware having issues with one persons specific hardware configuration and software setup does not constitute proof of anything.
Let's see, if what you say is true, that Linux is just awesome with hardware compatability then why does this site exist?
http://www.linux.org/hardware/
Why do similar sites not exist for windows? Oh, because ALL hardware is compatabile for windows and hence there is no need to create lists of it.
OK, I call bullshit. Tons of hardware doesn't work well or easily with Windows. People just never have to deal with it because Windows gets preinstalled.
Really? Would you like to provide some proof? Other than your lame camera and wifi example, which only suggest that you either got some bad hardware, or lucked out with a bad setup.
Consider the fact that you may be an outlier point in the scheme of things and that for 99% of people windows works just fine. Where is my proof you ask? How about the absense of *millions* of complaints about faulty hardware. If there really were *tons* of hardware that didn't work with windows, you'd hear about it all over the news. People don't just buy hardware and then leave it on their floor when it doesn't work.
I keep hearing that all that is needed is support from the manufacturers, but that isn't apparently enough.
Nope, and that's the problem. The open source community doesn't *want* closed binary style drivers a la windows, despite clamouring that windows has them and linux doesn't. For some companies where significant functionality is in the drivers, they won't release open source drivers. If Linux made it easy for people to release *plug and play* binary drivers, I'm sure there woudl be more support.
And as always, we will point out that we want a desktop *with security updates* which testing and unstable do not provide. Also, unstable really is unstable in terms of packages, definatly not something I would recommend even to seasoned power users. This is coming from my personal experience with it at two points in my life.
Except that closed source software is usually much better in regards to documentation. Why? Because when people are just 'scratching itches', or whatever the silly expression of the day is, they don't usually care what *others* think. Since THEY know how to use the program, they don't bother with documentation for others. Documentation is not fun to do.
On the other hand, closed developers are forced to make documentation by their superiors. Just becasue you don't find all those windows are make help files helpfull, doesn't mean that they are equally useless for everyone!
Aha, so when you hear the phrase "America is a free country", you obviously think "oh, I can do whatever I like there, because it's free", do you?
Yes. This is what people initially think. This is why there is an education process that people must go through in order to enter the country and most importantly get a permit to live and work in the country. The phrase 'America a free country' is also misleading, as the USA is certainly not as free as other countries is some regards.
This is also a very poor analogy you are making. The constitution has to do with 'human rights'. The GPL has more to do with the rights of the 'code' which makes little sense as the code is just a piece of information. The GPL has two purposes: to impose *some* restictions on users of the source code, and to grant *some* freedoms of use.
It's as simple as that. Trying to gloss over the restrictions by calling it 'free software' is simply misleading. The restictions in the GPL do not ensure freedom. Freedom is not 'imposed'. It's 'allowed'.
I'd be more impressed if the warrenty started from the purchase date. Currently, it starts from the date that the drive is shipped from the factory to the store.
So if you go and buy a drive that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years, oops, now you have a two year warrenty. I guess you are not losing much if you buy a 3 year old drive though.
Because I never go 60 in a 70 Zone. Here in Canada, I do 120 in a 100 zone. None the less, I *always* let people pass me by moving to the right lanes. People here LOVE to speed.
But you know what? Every now and then I STILL get some asshole who decides to tailgate me, even though the left lane is perfectly clear and they could easily pass me.
For these people, I wish I had a rear facing cannon.
Or another situation is when traffic is so tight that you *can't* move over to the right, and you *can't* go faster because there are 200 cars in front of you. Yet some sad excuse for a sentient being decides to ride your bumper thinking somehow that he can cause all 200 cars on the highway to move out of his way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't necessarily agree that people should be FORCED to protect themselves. I was using the seatbelt example more as in "we didn't know how important they are" and hence didn't wear them.
Emotions appear to be automatic neural responses to various sensory inputs. So I pretty much agree with your thoughts on how emotions work.
I never said you need to prove something 100%, but one should still attempt to obtain more information about a situation, time permitting of course. You example of law and order is actually illustrative of this. The detectives try to find as much information as possible to convince a jury to convict. It also highlights the dangers of relying on emotion. Many times the jury will 'buy' some act of the accused. These acts are designed to play on the jurys emotions and specifically 'confuse' the facts.
I also agree that there is a time facter in desicions. But, also drawing on the example of the military, trusting one's emotion is rarely the correct thing to do. Military training is designed to *overcome* emotion for the most part. If you are under fire, emotion will say to either run or hide. Of course, niether of those options is what solders are trained for. They are trained to fight. There *are* some rare examples of military training that rely on emotions, the Isrealie army comes to mind as one.
I say emotions are primitive because they evolved to be usefull in situtations which no longer occur. Many emotions, fight or flight, anger, love, were usefull to early nomadic tribes. Fighting over food, running from animals, keeping the men around to protect their young.
Today's world is different. We have the luxury to take the time to think about most of our situations. We understand how to train ourselves to overcome our emotions so we can excell at particular tasks. Unfortunately, we let our emotions rule us still. Take this example. There are lots of arguments whether or not we are cause the global destruction of our environment. Looking at it logically, if there is a reasonable chance we are, it is smart to try to prevent it while we research the matter furthur. If we ignore it, we are taking a pretty big gamble with the only thing which sustains our life, earth.
Of course, greed overcomes any logic in this case. People are willing to take this absurd gamble because of their overwealming greed. Sure, in nomadic times, greed served us well. But now, it's often far better to rely on logic.
Well, it's a hoax as you can see.
But the way he described it, the signal would have been in base 1, not base 10. In base one, you would write 11 as
11111111111
and 13 as
1111111111111
In the hoax post, the signal supposedly was made up of strings of a certain number of one's delimited by a single zero. Thus, the signal would be in base 1. Terribly inefficient, but simple I suppose.
Sooo, do you think you have enough information to make a logical decision to use your emotions? If you don't have enough infomration to make semi-logical choices for the majority of common situtaion, then perhaps you haven't thought about those situations enough.
Emotions were usefull in primitive society. Now, they often get you in trouble more than anything. Take anger. People following this emotion has led to road rage, killings, beatings, many firings, bad customer service, etc etc etc. Take love, people do SO many stupid things because of love. You think people would learn from these stupid things, but no. They do not. Or take greed.
If there is a lack of information avaliable, the logical thing to do is to try to FIND information. Not fall back on primitive emotions.
Perhaps what you are referring to are situations involving ethics. Where logic is perhaps too *harsh* to be applied. In these situations it is indeed wiser to follow one's emotions. But not because of a lack of information. Rather, because we are still quite primitive as a species. Regardless of what we think of ourselves, many of our actions are not at all logical, nor are the smart, or wise, or anything of the like. As a result, being logical in ALL situations will quickly get you branded a lunatic, heritic, insenstive, immoral, or any number of other derogatory terms.
Humans still incredibly stupid. We all simply have a HUGE ego problem.
Wow, that's four games more than I can play on Linux! Awesome!
Wow. Your country is insane. As a non-american, I don't want to see Bush re-elected. But that protest cage is disgusting as well.
:( The freedom your country defined has been eroded away to a mere shadow of what it once was.
I fear for the safty of the world from the menace that has become the USA.
I didn't realize that you were "most people". You think just because YOU haven't been affected by Microsoft vulnerabilities, that most other Windows users haven't been as well? That's an invalid generalization if there ever was one.
Notice I never said that most windows users have not been affected by a vulnerability? Notice that I said *I* have never been affected? Not being affected has a lot to do with knowing how to secure computer systems and avoid installing suspect software.
I do not disagree that there are bad microsoft vulnerabilities that affect a ton of users. But, slashdot is still overly zealous in their reports on microsoft vulnerabilities.
Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Microsoft software is technologically inferior.
Nope. Microsoft is not inferior at all. It is far more insecure, yes, but it's definatly not inferior. Part of why microsoft software is insecure is that it is far more complicated than other pieces of software. For instance, the recent run URI handler 'vulnerability' that slashdot jumped on. Mac OS X also has such functionality, and had similar vulnerabilites. Linux did not have similar vulnerabilites, because it does not have this functionality.
No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
Keep in mind that no other operating system EVER MADE has had the reach or user base that Windows has either. No doubt people will learn from Microsoft's mistakes, just as Microsoft has. This is the way of the world.
Airplanes used to have very little security, and people would even smoke on them. Cars originally had no seat belts, and even when they did, wearing them was not mandatory for the longest time. Moterbike riders didn't used to wear, or have to wear, helments. These are all absurd things *now*, but at the time people did not realize it.
Operatining systems are no different. Before the internet, microsoft did not need to think of securing in the way they do now. They realized the importance of it too late, and are now in quite a bind.
I always find it funny that people on slashdot tend to have a holier than thou attitude instead of a "let's observe and learn" attitude. This is why slashdot's silly anti-microsoft slant annoys me so. Other sites report on windows problems without being so snide.
Funny, I haven't been affected by even one microsoft vulnerability. I think slashdot overinflates the microsoft vulnerabilities.
The biggest microsoft vulnerability is the users. You could simply put up a page with instructions on how to install a backdoor prgram and many clueless users would go right ahead and do it so long as you promised great riches.
The only reason slashdot makes a big deal about microsoft vulnerabilities is because slashdot is pro linux and anit-microsoft. You want proof that slashdot is anti-microsoft?
Well, the slashdot microsoft icon is the windows icons, but with all the windows broken. No what fantasy world you live in, you cannot argue that that is not blatently anti-microsoft .
I *was* a customer of the RIAA. In fact, I used to buy quite a lot of CDs. But the RIAA lost me as a customer, due to their tactics and greed. Suing people was only the last straw for me. Why do you think people copy music? Let me outline to you why *I* became vehemently anti-RIAA.
So the internet MP3 music craze hit, I discovered internet radio. At the time, there were TONS of internet radio stations. By listening to these stations, I found huge amounts of new music. I had never heard anything like it before, it was a revelation. I found totaly new genres of music that I liked.
I'd also copy down the song names, and I was buying lots of music as a result. Now, I always preview the music before buying it. One song does not make me go out and buy an album. I have to like most of it to get it. CDNOW and HMV were often not bad for previews. But here is where the problem starts. See, the RIAA like to push only one type of music. Mass market pop drivel. And particularly they like to push RIAA licensed music. The primary genra of music I listen to is downtemp. This is decided *not* a market the RIAA likes to push. The RIAA has a significant influence over CDNOW and HMV, this becomes quite clear later on in this story.
CDNOW and HMV did not have previews for ALL music. Obvously, they want to provide previews for popular music first. Needless to say, much of the stuff I was interested in didn't have previews. So I'd download the album from p2p to preview it. If I liked it, I got the CD. See, I can tell the difference between CD and MP3 quality. Also some of my players don't like burned discs all that much. So I like buying CDs. I was happy with this arrangment of previewing using internet radio and downloading. I was buying record amounts music too.
Then the RIAA started bitching about downloading and calling people thieves. Seeing as how I occasionally downloaded things, this did not make me particularly happy. But it got worse. The RIAA attacted the online radio people first. I was getting more and more pissed off by their tactics at this point. Finally, they managed to pretty much kill most internet radio in the USA. Many of you will remember the likes of SomaFM going down, as well as many other stations. As I saw it, the RIAA tried to kill the one means of finding new music that I had.
Now I could still use european stations, and the one or two US based ones that manged to pay the RIAA tax. So it wasn't the end of the world yet. But BOY was I pissed. I was already buying less in protest of the RIAA. Then they really started targeting downloaders. By that point the online sites had far more previews, and I wasn't downloading nearly as much. But occasionally, I still needed to preview something for which no preview was avaliable. The RIAA started suing p2p users. They were trying to further limit my ability to sample music. Around the same time, more shit hit the fan.
Import albums always cost more than the US based pop drivel albums cost. It was always a sore point. Suddenly, HMV and other stores, start doing two things. If it's an import, it's *double* a regular cd. If it's a non-RIAA artist, YOU CAN'T EVEN BUY IT!! I don't buy any music now. Haven't for the last year or two. And it's the RIAA tactics that did it.
This is the chilling effect. It's very real and their sales figures are evidence of it.
This is what I also said, when the argument I just gave was put to me. I wanted to see what others thought of it though. I really need to study this stuff more.
Its a very silly idea because it breaks the principle of equivalence - you can now tell if you are in an elevator or a gravitational field by bringing a mass close to a test mass to almost cancel out the field and observing whether or not you see the weak gravity effect.
With sufficiantly accurate measurment devices (which we don't happen to have), you should be able to tell the difference between an elevator or a gravitational field anyways. Why? Gravity is a field. Therefore the force at your head is ever so slightly less than the force at your feet, theoretically. With an elevator, the force is the same throughout your body.
So, it seems you have a problem there anyways.
Of course I am stereotyping but Apple's success is based in their loyal, vocal, energetic community.
Yes. You are stereotyping. I'd say this was true 'historically'. But it's changing. For instance, the ipod is different in the sense that it's a *general* hit. Far more people buy and want ipods than those in the 'Apple community'. There are many many people who use ipods, but don't use Apple computers.
I'd say your stereotype is also fairly wrong for Apple computer users. I have a powerbook, I love it. But I'm not what you'd consider part of the 'Apple community'. Why did I buy a powerbook? Sure, the integration is asolutely amazing, and they are stunning machines, but I got it because of OS X. If it ran OS 9, I would not have bought it. There are a lot of unix users who are migrating to OS X and Apple. These people are not fanatical Apple fans. I am thoroughly impressed with OS X and with Apple machines. I'll even rave about them to others. But that is only because the technology is genuinly cool. I'll equally rave about other cool technology.
Real is targeting ipod owners, not apple community members. Hence, Real probably doesn't care much about this backlash.
Proprietary is anticompetitive by definition.
Really? Care to show me this definition? I always thought it was quite the opposite. Proprietary means that you think your technology is *better* than other peoples, and therefore valuble. You also think people will be willing to pay for it, instead of paying someone else for their technology. This is called competition.
Sharing like one big happy family is not competition. It's called working together. Open source is working together, it's not *competition*.
Now, *standards* are a different story. Having open standards is said to promote competition, yes. This is really relevant when one company has a monoply. In this case consumers will always go with the most prevalent protocal since they will not risk being in the position where their purchase will not work with item X. In such a case having an open standard will usually promote competition. Perhaps the ipod already constitutes a monoply, perhaps not.
I totally agree with you. DRM music is totally useless. I rarely play music on my PC and when I do I usually stream sites anyways. To have my music locked to say my windows computer only... is absolutely useless for me. What about my mac laptop? What about my car stereo? What about potential mp3 type players I might use in the future? What about my Linux computer at work? What if I want to take some music on a CD into a friends car?
A non-copy protected CD allows me to do all this, plus the music is non-lossy. Believe me, often times it's easy to tell the quality difference with certain music and stereo systems. Hell, I can even distinguish well recorded 'CD's from poorly recorded ones.
Except that tv repairmen and computer technicians are much much closer to one another in terms of education than lawers and garbage collectors.
Ah. Typical biased response from a Linux faithfull.
One piece of hardware having issues with one persons specific hardware configuration and software setup does not constitute proof of anything.
Let's see, if what you say is true, that Linux is just awesome with hardware compatability then why does this site exist?
http://www.linux.org/hardware/
Why do similar sites not exist for windows? Oh, because ALL hardware is compatabile for windows and hence there is no need to create lists of it.
OK, I call bullshit. Tons of hardware doesn't work well or easily with Windows. People just never have to deal with it because Windows gets preinstalled.
Really? Would you like to provide some proof? Other than your lame camera and wifi example, which only suggest that you either got some bad hardware, or lucked out with a bad setup.
Consider the fact that you may be an outlier point in the scheme of things and that for 99% of people windows works just fine. Where is my proof you ask? How about the absense of *millions* of complaints about faulty hardware. If there really were *tons* of hardware that didn't work with windows, you'd hear about it all over the news. People don't just buy hardware and then leave it on their floor when it doesn't work.
I keep hearing that all that is needed is support from the manufacturers, but that isn't apparently enough.
Nope, and that's the problem. The open source community doesn't *want* closed binary style drivers a la windows, despite clamouring that windows has them and linux doesn't. For some companies where significant functionality is in the drivers, they won't release open source drivers. If Linux made it easy for people to release *plug and play* binary drivers, I'm sure there woudl be more support.
And as always, we will point out that we want a desktop *with security updates* which testing and unstable do not provide. Also, unstable really is unstable in terms of packages, definatly not something I would recommend even to seasoned power users. This is coming from my personal experience with it at two points in my life.
Umm... why is this guy's so called 'Law' important? It doesn't seem to be true, and his own software doesn't follow it.
Except that closed source software is usually much better in regards to documentation. Why? Because when people are just 'scratching itches', or whatever the silly expression of the day is, they don't usually care what *others* think. Since THEY know how to use the program, they don't bother with documentation for others. Documentation is not fun to do.
On the other hand, closed developers are forced to make documentation by their superiors. Just becasue you don't find all those windows are make help files helpfull, doesn't mean that they are equally useless for everyone!
How was this modded funny??
It should be modded tragic.
At least the USA didn't get the Arrow. Imagine if the USA had advanced killing machines even earlier than they did!
Aha, so when you hear the phrase "America is a free country", you obviously think "oh, I can do whatever I like there, because it's free", do you?
Yes. This is what people initially think. This is why there is an education process that people must go through in order to enter the country and most importantly get a permit to live and work in the country. The phrase 'America a free country' is also misleading, as the USA is certainly not as free as other countries is some regards.
This is also a very poor analogy you are making. The constitution has to do with 'human rights'. The GPL has more to do with the rights of the 'code' which makes little sense as the code is just a piece of information. The GPL has two purposes: to impose *some* restictions on users of the source code, and to grant *some* freedoms of use.
It's as simple as that. Trying to gloss over the restrictions by calling it 'free software' is simply misleading. The restictions in the GPL do not ensure freedom. Freedom is not 'imposed'. It's 'allowed'.
I'd be more impressed if the warrenty started from the purchase date. Currently, it starts from the date that the drive is shipped from the factory to the store.
So if you go and buy a drive that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years, oops, now you have a two year warrenty. I guess you are not losing much if you buy a 3 year old drive though.
wtf??
How come the subject of my message changed on it's own? Weeeiiird.
Yes. People should try two things to move people out of the way.
First, flash your highbeams at the guy in front of you. Often this will work. Two, honk your horn.
Both methods are far far safer than tailgating.
Because I never go 60 in a 70 Zone. Here in Canada, I do 120 in a 100 zone. None the less, I *always* let people pass me by moving to the right lanes. People here LOVE to speed.
But you know what? Every now and then I STILL get some asshole who decides to tailgate me, even though the left lane is perfectly clear and they could easily pass me.
For these people, I wish I had a rear facing cannon.
Or another situation is when traffic is so tight that you *can't* move over to the right, and you *can't* go faster because there are 200 cars in front of you. Yet some sad excuse for a sentient being decides to ride your bumper thinking somehow that he can cause all 200 cars on the highway to move out of his way.